Gen-Z, interrupted

Born into the 1960s, my generation views the world through a singular, traditional lens. It is an opaque glass, slow to gather light and incapable of reflecting it with precision. We validated our reality through leather-bound texts and established custom, asserting authority by virtue of age and the technological triumphs of our youth. 

We watched the march of progress from integrated circuits and Intel microprocessors to Motorola mobile phones, VCRs, and the wild frontier of the dot-com boom. Exhausted by the velocity of our own advancement, we quietly concluded that human development had reached its zenith. Our politics, economics, and philosophy settled into a conservative consensus, blending command-and-control statecraft with cautious liberalism. 

In our world, intellect emanated strictly from seniority, while security meant financial safety and an aversion to risk. We learned to tolerate extraordinary global inequality, content with a modest comfort purchased through compromise.

Then came Generation Z, natives of a fully digitized environment who view our inherited structures with exhaustion. They do not look to western paradigms or graying elites for validation. Instead, their identity is forged online across Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok, guided by peer networks rather than institutional authority. They are pragmatic about money, hardened by global financial crises, and fearless in confronting systemic unfairness. 

Unlike their predecessors, they reject the linear promise of conventional education followed by dutiful employment. They inhabit the creator economy, juggling freelancing and digital enterprises alongside traditional study. In the workplace, they demand flexibility, purpose, and mental well-being over rigid schedules and modest salaries. 

Globally connected and acutely aware of climate anxiety, political polarization, and digital manipulation, they have developed a resilience that my cautious generation simply lacks.

The friction between these two groups is no longer a quiet domestic disagreement; it has become a fundamental state conflict. My generation relied on the arrogance of experience, guided by scholarly precedent and a fear of the unknown. Negativity grips us easily, whereas youth exhibits a striking composure during crisis. This clash is vividly illustrated by the political landscape of contemporary Bangladesh. 

Politicians of my era cling desperately to Westminster-style parliamentary procedures, deploying bureaucratic protocol to stifle the raw candor of the young. In formal chambers, pressing popular concerns are routinely veiled behind procedural excuses, forcing meaningful discourse out of parliament and onto podcasts, live streams, and independent television programs. My generation prioritizes the polite diction of manners over the urgent resolution of grievances. 

Generation Z cares nothing for political decorum. They identify a shovel as a shovel, indifferent to the social discomfort their honesty creates.

The stage is now set for a direct confrontation between this rising generation and an entrenched state. The wiser heads of the old guard find themselves utterly unable to comprehend the rhetoric of youth. We remain anchored to comfortable historical narratives and conventional political chatter, instinctively shrinking from unpolished truths born of lived experience. 

When young figures speak candidly about public service as an uncompromising duty to the people rather than a pathway to privilege, their elders react with visceral discomfort. When allegations of corruption are leveled against rising youth figures, the traditional political establishment and partisan media amplify the charges with eager hypocrisy, applying standards they famously spared the massive corporate oligarchs of the previous era. 

Meanwhile, when digital creators and cultural icons bypass traditional state institutions after suffering lawless attacks, the establishment recoils in confusion, unable to process a populace that no longer looks to the state for justice or validation.

The comfortable political class, which I embody, continues to misread the psychology of a generation that just sacrificed its blood in the July Revolution. We treat their historic uprising as a temporary disruption rather than a permanent realignment of national power. This is a fatal miscalculation. 

Generation Z and the cohorts aligned with their ethos represent more than seventy percent of Bangladesh’s population. They did not merely protest against an autocratic government; they reinvented the concept of citizenship in real time. They possess the demographic weight, the technological fluency, and the moral clarity required to dictate the future of the nation.

My generation’s long monopoly on power, statecraft, and social interpretation has drawn to a natural close. We built a world around stability, deference, and incremental change, only to watch it crumble under the weight of its own compromises. The young have inherited a compromised state, but they have refused to accept its limitations. 

As they dismantle the obsolete conventions that held back national progress for decades, the old guard will find that its traditional levers of control no longer function. Our opinions, our procedural objections, and our insistence on administrative etiquette will barely matter. The future of the state is already being written, and for the first time in sixty years, we are not the ones holding the pen.

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Brig Gen AF Jaglul Ahmed, ndc, psc, PhD (Retd) contributes to national dailies. He can be reached at jagglulahmed@gmail.com